kareina

...sometimes they take time.

For a year or so now (perhaps longer), every time we would get ready to go to a party in modern clothing I would look through the closet, and realize, once again, that I don't really own any shirts that are "dressy". Of course I only ever thought of this as we were getting ready, so there wasn't anything I could do about it, and would make do with what I have. (Luckily, parties for which the expected clothing is modern don't come up all that often, and my informal clothing is generally kinda cute.)

However, we actually thought about what to wear this weekend when we head down for H & K's wedding enough time in advance that I could actually do something about it. I already posted pictures of the new embroidered apron and pocket I made for my folk dance costume (and if you missed the photo of me wearing it, you can go look here). But the festivities associated with the wedding will go on all weekend, and I also wanted something else to wear for Friday evening.

Therefore I did that thing I avoid doing. I went shopping. Many thanks to C. who did the research in advance to figure out where the stores are in Luleå that *might* have something pretty in a fibre I would wear, and where they are located. We found a black button up Merino Wool sweater at one of the first stores we checked, which I purchased (despite having plenty of black sweaters, since the others are either cotton, or, in one case, a heavy wool-cotton blend).

The rest of the stores managed to convince me that my taste in colour is fashionable just now. Tons of things in lovely shades of dark blue. Plenty of really pretty maroon. Sadly, synthetic fabrics are also in, and I am just not willing to go there. There isn't a store in town high end enough to carry linen, silk, or wool as their main items. However, at about store five or six we found some cotton shirts in a lovely dark blue fabric with an interesting stripy weave.

However, those shirts had some flaws:

*3/4 length sleeves of the kind that are meant to be rolled up and buttoned above the elbow, meaning too bulky to put a sweater on over them, but not warm enough for the forearms on a cool day.
*said sleeves were attached in such a way that the only comfortable position for one's arms while wearing the shirt is down by one's side. Any attempt to raise one's arms would result in all of the fabric on the side of the shirt raising till one's tummy was exposed to cool air.
*the shirt body was both (mostly) straight cut and wide, so that even the ones which are supposedly small enough to fit me were still quite loose and not at all flattering.
*the front was pleated to just under the breast, causing the stomach of the shirt to protrude in a very pregnant manner.

However, neither of us felt for checking yet more stores, we had already been out for more than an hour. Therefore we decided to buy one about four or five sizes too big, so that I could take it in, but use the extra bit removed from the sides to fix the sleeves.

Therefore I have:

*extended the pleating down to the waist
*cut off the sleeves
*taken in the original sleeves so that they actually fit my fore-arm
*chopped off the top of the original sleeves so that they are now straight cut just above my elbow.
*attached the strips of fabric cut off of the sleeves to that edge just above the elbow, such that the stripes of the narrow strip goes around my arm (perpendicular to the stripes going up the forearm)
*pinned the side seams of the body to a comfortable, flattering fit
*cut off the excess fabric from the sides
*cut each of those strips in half to make upper arms for the sleeves
*sewed shut the sides of the shirt from bottom of the arm hole to the waist
*hemmed side slits from waist to hips
*cut square underarm gores from the curved part that used to be the top of the upper arms
*attached the underarm gores to the bottom of the original arm pit holes, thus reducing their size to better actually fit my arms

and (for arm #1):
*cut off the horrid serged seams in those upper arm strips and sewed the pieces back together with flat-felled seams
*sewed the sets of pieces together for the upper arms
*sewed the upper arms to the arm hole, pleating the top of the shirt in slightly at the back of the shoulder to further reduce the size to match the amount of fabric that was available for making the upper arms which are comprised of five pieces, four from the sides of the shirt, and the fifth a triangle from what was left of the forearm sleeve scrap, all of which have their stripes more or less running parallel with my arm, but none of which have their stripes quite parallel with one another due to the way the shirt had been made(see the word "mostly" modifying the phrase "straight cut" above).
*pinned the upper arm to the forearm to determine it would work.

At that point I decided that I needed a break and stopped to do yoga and, now that that is done type this. Next I will return to sewing. I just need to finish the first sleeve and then repeat those steps for the next sleeve and I will be done. So far it is over 8 hours of sewing, so I can't imagine that the full project will take less than 10.

The good news is that the new arms are so comfortable--with that square underarm gore I can lift my arm fully over head without the fabric of the body moving anywhere at all. I will never understand why modern clothing manufactures want to use those horrid curved top sleeves that don't actually permit movement. I have seen sleeves with curved shoulders that are designed to move one's arms, are they really that much harder to do than the ones this shirt came with?

In other news, I have been doing yoga with an interval timer fairly often recently. Today I set the timer to do 100 sets of 45 seconds each, figuring that number would be big enough that I wouldn't run out of timer before I had done all of the yoga poses I felt for. I did, however, use up enough of those 45 seconds-es that I did a full 57 minutes of yoga! One day not too long back I set the timer for 80 sets of 1 minute each, and managed more than an hour. Other days it has "only" been 35 minutes, but even so it is better than the 12 or 20 minutes I manage on a night I am sleepy and don't set a timer.

But it is time to close this and see if I can finish the machine sewing (using the treadle machine, of course, since we fixed it, and I like it ever so much better than electric) tonight. I can finish the hand-finishing of the seams on the fore-arms in the car tomorrow (my arms are narrow enough that it isn't worth doing the second pass of a flat-felled seam by machine--it might be possible, but it wouldn't be pleasant).

K & H said that their doors open to guest tomorrow at 14:00. It is pretty much four hours from our place to theirs. Therefore, so long as we are on the road sometime between 10:00 and 13:00 we should be there at a reasonable time.

I got a comment to my recent lj postwith links to photos of my bliaut in progress, wherein I mentioned that each sleeve is made up of ten pieces of fabric, which asked: "Why so many pieces - is that the period example, or did you have small bits of fabric?"

This is a good question, and one that deserves its own post, so I am replying here instead of there.

In part it was because the first bliaut I made myself was made from a very narrow and not that long piece of fabric, so to make the most of it I first cut the fabric in half lengthwise, which gave me two pieces exactly as wide as my shoulder, from which I cut off my body rectangle and then turned the rest into the sleeves and skirt gores. In order to have enough fabric for everything I chose to do the inset skirt gores only as high as the tops of my thighs, while the side gores went all the way to my waist, and that left just enough to do a large square for the bottom of the sleeve, the main sleeve rectangles, and two more small rectangles, which I cut into three triangles and set into a slit in the sleeve rectangle, to make the sleeves as wide as I could make them.

The effect I was going for with the sleeves is what is seen in this period illustration of St. George and the Dragon, and to my eye I managed to pull that off, but I can't find any photos of me in that dress with my arms in quite that position.

I didn't have any extant examples of a bliaut I was working from, but just used the period mind set cutting logic of combining rectangles and triangles to make the fabric fit with as little wasting of fabric as possible. That was the first project I had done using such narrow skirt gores, and I was really, really, really happy with the result, since cutting them so narrow gave a few nice side effects, the most important two of which are A) the fact that the slight curve cut from the bottom to make the hem line smooth meant that my only scrap fabric for the dress was a bunch of little bits about 1.5 cm wide and 15 cm long and B) the fact that the bottom hem never deviates much from the grain of the fabric, so it doesn't tend to sag, which means that the curve I cut for the hem before sewing the fabric together was the same curve that I hemmed when the dress was done, and the hem is still as even today as it was when I made it, more than six years ago. Likewise, the tiny triangles that went into the sleeve gore gave similar benefits for the sleeve.

Therefore, since I was so happy with how that one came out, when I made my second one, from a much larger piece of fabric I made only two changes: I used much longer body rectangles, to try for the tummy wrinkles that show up in some statues from the time, and I made a larger square gore for the sleeve bottom.

However, bigger is better, when it comes to 12th century sleeves, and many of the statues show much longer sleeves for women, so I decided to adapt the exact same logic for my third try, which is still in progress (page through the album to see other photos). This time, instead of attaching the large square to the bottom of the sleeve rectangle directly I put a set of three triangle gores in between the large square and the sleeve rectangle on each side, and a set of two triangle gores into the slit in the mid point of the rectangle. (Note: the diagram in that album showing how the pieces come together is wrong--it shows fewer sleeve triangle gores than actually exist.) As a result that gets the project up to 10 pieces per sleeve.

Could I have done it using fewer pieces? Of course. However, if I had opted to, for example, cut the triangle gores as a single large triangle instead of assembling them from sets of three narrower ones, that would have created larger pieces of scrap cut off the curve at the bottom of the triangles (yet still not large enough to be useful), and it may well have changed how they drape, since a significant portion of those triangles would be free to stretch on the bias.

So, do I know for certain that they did it this way? Nope. Is it plausible given what I know about period fabric cutting techniques? Yup. Will I use this approach again? Probably, I really like the result.

I have done a variety of short posts here in the week since returning from my Lofoten adventure to visit northernotter, but I haven't made the time to record the highlights of that trip, so I will now see how much I can remember...

The adventure begun on Wednesday, 28 Aug, when I was really, really feeling the lack of mountains locally, and wanting to see some. So I asked northernotter in FB chat if she would be home that weekend, and she said she would and I was welcome to come on up. Since the next day was the local SCA social/arts night here (and the first one of the season now that summer is over), I decided I could stay home one more day, and I bought my train tickets for Friday morning.

My train departed at 05:53 and took me as far as Narvik, on the Norwegian coast. Well into the Swedish mountains we were boarded by a fairly large group of school children (I guess in the 12 to 15 year old age range) who were speaking something that sounded German to my ear. They stayed on the train till the next stop, and were every bit as noisy the whole time as one might expect. As the train was pulling into the station one of their accompanying adults looked at me and said "now you will get some peace and quiet". I smiled and asked "school trip?", and he replied "yes, 8 days hiking in the mountains", and he looked totally exhausted as he said it. I commented "That sounds delightful for them, but rather hard on the adults", and he nodded, and picked up the headset that one of the kids had left behind and he followed them off the train.

We arrived in Narvik a bit before 15:00, and the bus to Lofoten departed at 15:30. The bus was rather full, so I wound up sitting in the very back, in the middle seat, which meant I could easily look out both windows. The bus arrived in Svolvær around 20:00, and northernotter and I drove to her place, which is in a village not to far from there.

She has a fabulous view! There is a beautiful mountain peak framed by her kitchen window, and more mountains on every side (though on one side one can't see the mountains for the small ridge behind the house). So wonderful to live in a world framed by "up" again, even if only for a few days.

I, of course, wasn't hungry when I got in, it being evening, but she cooked up a yummy smelling dinner for her family, which made more than enough for left overs to take with us for lunch the next day, when I discovered that it was every bit as tasty as it had smelled the night before.

I enjoyed the chance to meet the rest of her family. Her son had come along to the Medieval days here, so I had met him before, but he was noticeably more sociable and talkative at home than he had been at his first SCA event, and I rather liked him. Her daughter is a total delight, and she was also kind enough to give up her bed for me to sleep in (she took an air mattress the first night, the couch the second, and the third night, since her brother was gone, she took his room). I also enjoyed her husband's company, and even the dog is well behaved and pleasant to be around, so the social interaction part of the adventure was a win on all fronts.

But that was just a bonus, because, lets face it, the reason one goes to Lofoten is to see the mountains and fjords, and I couldn't have picked a better weekend to do that. The temperatures were comfortable--neither too warm nor too cold, the sun was out and the sky was blue.

Saturday morning northernotter, I, and her dog, went out for our first adventure. We drove down to the SW corner of her island, parked the car, and set off looking for a trail she had never tried before, but was mentioned in her guidebook. The first part was easy—along the rocks by the coast and past the summer cottage belonging to someone (what a stunning place for a summer cottage). Then there appeared to be something resembling a trail a bit further up the hill, and we opted to go that way, but soon we were just walking between the trees and the juniper bushes, working our way up the hill a bit, and a bit further to the northwest, parallel with the coast and the mountain ridge above us. Eventually the going started getting quite a bit steeper, and we got high enough that we could see a trail, way down below us, near the coastline. At this point we needed to use our hands a lot, and wondered if we were going a useful direction.

Therefore I went on a bit ahead, past some harder bits that were still within my skill level for free climbing (even though I haven't done any climbing since last November, when I visited linda_linsefors in Grenoble) to see if it looked like it was getting easier, or if it lead anyplace useful. I got to a nice, flatter area of easy going, but I couldn't tell if it was going to lead anywhere useful, and from there it wasn't possible to see northernotter anymore, so I opted to head back down to where she was.

Did I say that those "harder bits" were still within my skill level? Make that "just barely within my skill level for down climbing", though they hadn't seemed that hard going up. I paused often to consider my next move on the decent back down to her. As I got back into sight I discovered that her dog, which is on the smallish side (though not so small as to be one of those little yappy dogs), had gotten ahead of her by a good 6 to 10 meters, but was now stuck—the poor thing was looking back down hill, but so not willing to take the jump from the rock she was on to the ground below it, and I can't say as I blame her—the drop was only about three times her height, but the landing spot was small and sloped.

So northernotter told her to "wait" (a skill they worked on lots when she was a puppy), and I worked my way down to, and then just below her, then lifted her down to where I was standing, and worked my way a bit lower, and then lowered her again, repeating the process till we were back down to where northernotter was standing, and the going was, once again, easy enough for a smallish dog to proceed on her own four feet.

Since that path up the hill had been pronounced a dead end (thought I will never know if I could have found a way to continue if I had gone on) we worked our way back down the hill, found the trail we had seen from above, and tried to follow it. Only to lose it again. How does a trail that is so clear one minute become so invisible the next? It is like people (or animals?) walk on that short stretch of path, and then switch to only walking on rocks. We never did find a way to get to the valley between the ridge we had gone part way up, and the next ridge, and by then we were wondering if the trail we had seen on the floor of that valley is actually the one mentioned in the guide book.

By then a couple of hours had elapsed, so we decided to head back to the car, this time working our way along the rocky coastline, admiring the pretty deformation in the lovely metamorphic rocks. I was delighted to note a huge difference in my confidence level and balance for the return trip as compared to how it felt walking along the rocks along the coast on our way in. There is nothing like challenging oneself with the more serious climbing to make the easier stuff feel, well, easy! I could, once again, hop over small chasms without flinching, and given the choice between an easy way and a fun way, I was choosing the fun paths.

After that walk we drove completely around the small island just to the northwest of her island, and admired the incredible views before driving back to town to get groceries and then to the house.

That night they served salted cod for dinner. This is not to be confused with salt cod. The former is made from fresh (or frozen and thawed) fish which is covered with a little coarse salt over night before being cooked in a pot on the stove, while the latter is a method of preserving and drying fish to keep for ages without refrigeration (and is one of the reasons that Lofoten was responsible for the generation of a hugely high percentage of Norway's wealth in the middle ages). I was slightly hesitant to try the cod, since I have never liked fish, but, since I couldn't detect any unpleasant smells wafting across the table (as I usually do when others are eating fish), I decided to be brave, and took a bite. It wasn't unpleasant, so I even took a couple of more bites. I didn't eat enough to make any noticeable difference to the amount of fish available for the meal (which was served with carrots in a white sauce and potatoes with butter (churned from cream which had been let to sour a bit first), but it was enough to claim I have eaten fish.

On Sunday we enjoyed a lazy morning around the house. I read Little House in the Highlands, a book on her daughter's shelf that I hadn't known existed before this trip, and loved every bit of. Must see if there is a Swedish translation, and must find all the other books written about Laura's ancestors and daughter—I grew up reading (and re-reading) the Laura Ingalls Little House books, and I have most of those in Swedish now (and have already read them all twice) but I had no idea all of these new ones existed.

In the afternoon we took a drive around the south side of the next big island to the south, the one with the Viking Museum in the middle of it, and then we took the main road up the central valley, past that museum. We didn't visit this time (lofd_kjar and I had been there two years ago when we visited Lofoten, before we met northernotter), but instead took a short hike up the ridge to the north west of it, where we had a lovely picnic. My phone battery can't be trusted, so I didn't take any photos, but northernotter got a decent photo me looking out the opposite direction from the museum (the sun was directly on the other side of the museum from us, so it wasn't a good time for photos that direction).

On Monday she had to work, so I went out for a walk just outside her door, and really enjoyed it. I wound up doing a 6 km loop, first across the main road an onto the trails (which are lighted ski trails in the winter), and then back onto the roads when I got to the school, heading back down to the coast (next to the Lofoten Museum, which I didn't visit, either), then along the coast and over the ridge back to her neighbourhood. There were, rarely, blueberries along my path, which I was "tvungen" to eat.

After my walk I finished reading another book that I hadn't really known existed. When I was a kid one of my favourite books was The Big Black Horse, but I had no idea that it was a (VERY) abridged version of a longer novel. Therefore you may understand my surprise and delight to discover a copy of The Black Stallion on her daughter's shelf—it took only a page to realize that it was the same story, even if there was So Much More in the way of detail (the boy has a full name! A back story!), and I happy settled into reading it. Much to my surprise, the book continues WAY past where it end in the version I had had (which stops with the rescue). I wonder how I missed the long version while growing up?

When northernotter got off of work her husband and I picked her up, and we three had time to sit and visit a bit longer at a café before they put me on the bus back to Narvik. While the bus to Lofoten is nicely coordinated with the train schedule, the reverse trip is not. I could have taken the morning bus, but it would have reached Narvik about an hour after the train departed. Therefore I took the afternoon bus and couch surfed in Narvik that night.

My host was a nice lady who worked on a knitting project whilst I did some nålbinding. She has a baby who had fun mimicking me during yoga, and, when I sat down on the floor for the floor poses crawled right into my lap for a hug. She laughed and said that is typical of her son—Stranger? Hug it! She needed to head to uni early on Tuesday morning, so I packed up my bags and walked down the hill to the train station, which was closed when I arrived at 08:00, never mind the sign on the door that said it is open from 07:00. So I still don't know if the rumours of luggage lockers existing at the station are true or not. Instead I took my bags with me and went to a hotel for breakfast.

I don't normally like to pay restaurant prices for food whilst traveling (especially since I am such a fussy eater), but I decided that it would be worth it in this case, and, indeed it was, since the let me put my bags into the locked room behind the front desk there, and then, after I had finished eating a large meal (since I knew I would be traveling all day), they said I was welcome to leave the bags there while I went out for walk. So I went into the city center and did some window shopping (most shops not yet being open for the day). Luckily for me, that was a "most", and not an "all", since I happened upon a yarn shop which was open.

I have a nålbinding project in progress that had been on hold due to having run out of yarn. I got the yard from a friend at an SCA event, and she got it from Gotland, where it was hand spun by the woman who owns the sheep it came from. When I was running low on that yarn I took the hat to the local yarn store in Luleå, and determined that none of the grays here was anywhere near matching it. So I cut a tiny length of the yarn and attached it to my keychain, in hopes I would find a better match elsewhere. Sure enough, the yarn shop in Narvik had something suitable. Not quite perfect—the commercial stuff is not as tightly spun, and there is a hint of difference in the colour, but I am not certain that the difference is going to show all that much, since I am working in Omani Stitch, which is really dense stitch. (So far I have had time to do only a few hours more of stitching on this with the new thread, which is not enough to do a full lap around the hat.)

After buying the yarn and some groceries for the trip I collected my luggage and went to the train station. By then it was 10:00, and there was a train sitting on the tracks. The sign on it said it was going to Luleå. So I asked the conductor if I could take this train instead of the one at 12:30 for which I had tickets. He said "yes, but this one can't leave till 13:00", and explained that there were issues with departure, and while this train had been scheduled to leave earlier than mine, it had been rescheduled.

Therefore I boarded the train and got out my sexy Viking cloak in progress, sat at a table and begun stitching. A couple of hours later the conductor came round to explain to us that the delay had been caused by a rock fall in a tunnel, and that they would be getting us a bus to Björkliden, the next train station beyond the rock fall, but they didn't yet know when that would arrive. A bit before 15:00 he came back and said that the bus should be here by 16:00—that they couldn't find any closer, so there was one coming from Kiruna for us.

A bit later I got a SMS from the train company saying that due to a rock fall the 12:30 train was being replaced by a 16:30 bus, which would depart from the train station and take us to Björkliden. I laughed because that was old news, and the departure time was rather later than the 16:00 the conductor had guessed.

Since I trusted the conductor better than I did the SMS I packed away my sewing a bit before 16:00, and was ready when the bus arrived. The trip to the next station took 1.5 hours, and then we settled onto a new train, and I got my sewing project back out. This train also had a school group, this time only 24 Swedish high school kids and their teachers (and a few parents). Two of the teachers sat across from me, and we chatted (largely in Swedish), for much of the ride home. One of the teachers is a handicrafts teacher at the school, and the other knows one of my SCA friends, so both were interested in my cloak in progress.

Thanks to all of the delays it was after midnight before we were home and so I did my yoga and went straight to sleep.

The week and weekend since have been fun and busy, but it is now 01:00, and I have things to do tomorrow, so that story will have to wait for another day.

I was inspired to sew last weekend, and, sensibly, opted to finish a UFO before undertaking the new idea. ( The UFO in question )

I think will be one of my favourite shirts.

Then, when that was done, I felt free to start a new project, and finally begun the cutting of my ( new wool Viking style tunic )

However, this week has been busy enough that I haven't made time for sewing on that project. Monday evening I was doing stuff on the computer. Tuesday was choir, and while I did sew whilst we sang (of course!), I opted for a tiny project--hemming some silk scrap into a set of three hair ribbons joined at one end, for braiding into my hair, which I completed shortly before choir ended.

As a side note--I am liking having silk hair ribbons for braiding into my hair--by making the silk longer than my hair I can braid them into my hair and keep braiding the silk even after the hair runs out, and then, when I reach the end I can take one of the three strands of ribbon and tie it in a simple overhand knot over the other two strands, which is plenty to keep the braid from unraveling, and I am not tying an elastic band around my hair at any point, so it is less likely to break. Another nice side effect is that I finally have that dark blue hair I wanted so much as a child, just by using blue silk--my braids are mostly brown at the top, with a hint of the blue ribbon showing through, and, as the braids lengthen they become gradually more and more blue as there are fewer and fewer strands of my hair that reach that length, till, at the bottom, it is all blue. It will be interesting to see if my hair gets a little longer doing this thanks to not breaking it off with pony tail holders.

( and last night I started yet another new project )

So now I have two projects in progress, and one completed to replace the single UFO I managed to finish on Saturday...

Now that winter is, finally (thankfully!) here, and we are enjoying temps around -22 C (-8 F) most days I am finding that I had forgotten the layering lessons from last winter, no doubt, because I never wrote them down. Sure, I know that on warmish winter days I need only my normal full length wool winter coat, and that when it gets really cold I need more than that, but the exact definition of the transition between "warmish winter days" and "really cold" had been forgotten.

I knew that one solution to "really cold" I used last year was to put my huge down coat on over my backpack and normal wool coat (that coat has a pair of heavy over mittens threaded through the sleeves, for putting on over my normal nålbinded gloves). This has an advantage of keeping the water in the camelback pack from freezing, so I can continue to sip water now and then while I walk. I tried this on Thursday, and determined that -22 is NOT really cold, because I hadn't completed the first kilometer of my walk by the time I was sweating, and needed to take off the down coat. I didn't feel for carrying it in my hands, so I wrapped the arms around my neck, and left it to hang as a cloak, which was still too warm, but better than carrying it.

Today I took a shorter walk, but still long enough to determine that today's laying option was better. Today I had been wearing wool tights and a long skirt, so when I went out I pulled on my snow pants over the tights (but under the skirt), put on my normal wool coat, then my fur-lined hood (and linen coif under it, to keep the fur from tickling my neck), and then grabbed the fur sleeve from the same coat I used to make the hood. I pinned a tablet woven band to each end of the sleeve with a long loop between just the right length to hang the sleeve from my neck as a muff (fur side in) to keep my hands warm. This worked much better than the down coat+heavy mittens option of yesterday! for one thing, when I want to take my hands out of the muff to use them, I don't have the big mittens hanging at my wrists getting in the way.

However, I have determined that when I actually sew the fur sleeve into a wool lining to make a pretty muff I should use both sleeves (open them up and then sew them together into a wider tube) so that I can more easily put my arm well into the muff, including the sleeve of the coat. Just what I need, another project idea, as if I don't have plenty of them already...

Of course, that could be because I have been doing SCA for... more than 30 years now (is that number really possible?), and this is my first time trying "live-action-role-playing. We chose our character because one of the people in charge of the Calaquendi, the (race? tribe?) of elves that we have joined, expressed a desire to have more music and dance at their events, so lord_kjar decided to be a musician, and I a dancer. Apparently many Lajv events the people wear costumes that are more or less the same as medieval fashions, and had we joined one of those groups we could have simply worn costumes we already have. But, as luck would have it, the fashion for the Calaquendi is very, very, different from Medieval clothing, so, as I mentioned last post, we have been doing a fair bit of sewing and other organizational stuff to get ready for this weekend's event. We are planning on bringing way less stuff than we do for a typical SCA camping event, and yet, it seems we are taking way more time to get ready for this one than I ever have for SCA camping.

He has just gone to pick up a rental trailer, since there are four of us driving out together and we need room in the car for bodies. When he gets here we will finish packing and loading up, then in the early afternoon we will drive out to the site (about an hour to get there, I think), set up the pavilion (which will be home to seven of us this weekend), then drive back to town for the first SCA dance practice held at the university here, which I am organizing, this evening, then head back out to site to sleep. In the morning we are meant to wake up "in character" and spend the weekend being someone else. My someone else isn't so different from me, in that she is a dancer, but she has elf-ears (which I will need to glue on), and is 1000s of years old (because the "old tongue" in game is represented by English, and the "common tongue" which is more widely used now days is represented by Swedish, so being old and from far away nicely explains why I am not so fluent in the common tongue as I am the older, more formal language).

Because the site has no electricity I intend to switch my phone to airplane mode in hopes that its battery will last long enough for me to keep my food log up to date over the weekend. If necessary I can switch to pen and paper, but, really, electronic is much simpler to deal with later. But this means I will have no internet for 3.5 days in a row. How will I cope?

I decided to inventory and organize our fabric this week. It only took two days to finish the task (NOT counting scrap fabric, of course, that didn't get inventoried or measured, though I have a good idea of what is there, and it is one fiber type per box). The totals are:

163 meters total, but some of the pieces are very narrow. This might be balanced by some of the others, which are very wide.

This breaks down to:

77 meters wool
45 meters Linen
5 meters Silk
37 meters cotton

Or, if you prefer to sort by colour:

75 meters blue (ranging from bluish grey through to midnight)
39 meters black
31 meters white, cream, "natural", and grey
12 meters of reds, maroons, and orangish red
6 meters of greens and yellows

Some of this fabric is downright decadent to touch, and we really should make time for sewing so as to use this stuff. Fabric is meant to sew, not be stored!

However, before we do that I should finish some of the projects in progress, the most urgent of which are:

* my sexy cloak
* my fur lined hood
* my new bliaut

A couple of years ago I visited the museums in Vienna with Racaire and got to see for myself the gorgeous blue tunic. Seeing the details of the sewing up close convinced me that it is missing a decorated over bit.

Today I was catching up on reading the 12th Century garb email list and saw a link there to one of her photos of a belt which is displayed in the same collection, and was reminded of the tunic. I don't remember if I mentioned my thoughts on the missing bit here before, or if it has only come up in conversation, but even if I did it might bear repeating, since I have links to specific photos ready to hand just now, and I know that some of my friends are interested in such things.

Why do I think it is missing something? Well, you can see in this photo that the neck slit isn't meant to be seen--the stitching along the neck slit is a coarse covering of the edge and no where near as pretty as even the other seams, and doesn't come close to comparing with the fancy establishments on the cuffs and hem (see neighbouring photos).

The other clue is the tunic in the next display case. As you can see, there is a rectangular beaded and embroidered section sitting over the neckline of the white tunic. If the blue one had such a thing that matched the cuffs and hem it would explain why the tunic itself is so plain on the neck, and why the quality/style of stitching is so different for the neck slit compared to the other seams.

The rest of my trip to Tromsø went well. The classes were intense, which is good because then one doesn't mind being in class all day long. We made good time on the return trip, and this week has been zipping by. When I got back to town I emailed my new boss and asked him if there is anything else I should or should not be doing before our meeting on 31 Oct. to finalize the hiring paperwork (and my starting on 1 Nov). He replied that they are doing a short course on the use of Leapfrog the 27th of October and perhaps I might like to attend. Since my job description talks of 3D geochemical modeling of ore deposits, and this is a program designed to do 3D modeling of ore deposits I told him I would be delighted to attend. It looks like a fun toy, so I am looking forward to learning how to use it.

This week's major accomplishments are all sewing prep for the trip to Germany this weekend. I managed to finish the big project, and tonight we are making him a new tunic ("we" means that yesterday I cut most of the pieces and today I cut the sleeves, hemmed the neckline and sleeve cuffs by hand, and tonight he is using a sewing machine to assemble it). When that is assembled I also have another machine-sewing project lined up and ready for him to stitch. Because we are staying on site we are bringing our camping mattress, which is two thermarest pads and a fabric case we made to hold them next to one another when we sleep. However, when flying luggage space is at a premium, so rather than bringing the cotton sheets upon which we have slept on other travel occasions we are switching to silk. We bought two silk sleeping bag liners from a camping store today, and I cut them open and have pinned them together ready to sew into one huge bag. Luckily, if he doesn't get to it tonight we still have tomorrow after work, since we don't fly out till 06:00 on Friday morning.

I am looking forward to the trip--getting there should be fun in and of itself--there is a good group of us flying down from northern Sweden for this event, The Garden of Earthly Delights). (I suspect the good turn out has to do with the fact that our Prince and Princess live up here, and they announced their travel plans early on, and a number of the rest of us decided to head to Germany for this event, too.) Most (all?) of us are on the same flight, leaving here at 06:00 on Friday, and returning at 23:55 on Sunday, and we are sharing a rental car from the airport to the site.

It will be good to see friends from all over, meet new people, do some dancing, participate in the arts fair, and actually eat food at the feast. Yes, that is right, I get to eat--the cooks are doing a day-time feast! How civilized! I haven't eaten at an SCA feast since the one I ran in Tassie when blamebrampton made the trip south. Before that was the last Bard of the Mists feast I attended, which would have been 2002. I accept the fact that I am simply not hungry in the evenings, but it can make social eating difficult (which, given the fact that I like being slender, may not always be a bad thing).

Next week when I return I will go see our Prince in another capacity--in the modern world he is a doctor, and he has been training under Sweden's foremost ear surgeon. I am way past due for a new pair of hearing aids (and really want ones with blue tooth capability, so I can hear a phone through them), but in addition to seeing their audiologist I will also see His Highness, who will look at my ears and see if he agrees with my Australian audiologist that surgery will not help the problem with my ears. I am assuming that she was correct, but it would be silly not to check since I happen to have a friend who is qualified for such things.

The following week will start my new job--I am looking forward to it, but I will miss the free time. Hopefully I will be able to use the sudden decrease in free time to focus and make even more productive use of what free time is left.

This week was midsummer. I forgot to check sunrise and sunset times for solstice itself, but for today the sun rose here in Luleå at 01:02, and the sun will set tonight at three minutes after midnight; we are around 65.5 degrees north, so still south of the Arctic Circle, so the sun does set, but, as you can see, not for long.

Midsummer is a major holiday here, everyone has that Friday off of work--grocery stores close early (if they open at all), and the Saturday counts as a Sunday for determining if and when shops open. Our local Folk Music and Dance group is Very active in the celebrations. We all gathered in Gammelstead, at the old schoolhouse where we meet for music and dance sessions early Friday morning, all in our costumes appropriate to the area in the late 1800's. I have been borrowing one from one of the other dancers that she can no longer wear, but we managed to get archinonlive's wool shirt finished on time for the weekend's festivities (or, rather, finished enough--a couple of the seams could still use covering inside so that the zig-zagged edges don't rub unpleasantly.

In some ways the morning felt much like an SCA event--friends gathered in costume, some music, dance (practice for the afternoon's shows) followed by a shared lunch (traditional Swedish food appropriate to the era--desert was a jelly-roll style cake served with fresh strawberries and whipped cream, I could not resist!). We had around 40 people in the group, ranging from about 10 years old to probably 70--all of us musicians or dancers (or family members thereof?). The morning weather was lovely and sunny, with plenty of pretty clouds decorating the sky, and we were mostly outside, talking and practicing.

However, while we were inside enjoying lunch the rain that had been promised arrived (we had been checking its approach on the radar images on line on his phone off and on all morning). So as it came time to process over to the stage for the mid day performances the musicians put their instruments into cases and drove over (normally they play them for the procession) and we dancers covered up our costumes either with plastic rain cloaks, or (in my case) a wool cloak, and umbrellas and walked over there with a minimum of fan fare. On arrival we erected the summer pole (wood which had been covered with fresh branches of leaves wrapped around it, some flowers, and blue and yellow ribbons--shaped like a cross, but with big wreaths of more leaves and ribbons and flowers depending from the side arms) with due ceremony and music from the musicians (who, being on a covered stage, were happily dry while the rest of us were in the rain.

Due to the rain the crowds of the public there to watch numbered only in the hundreds--I am told that most years (when the sun shines) there are more like 7,000 or 8,000 people present. Since it was raining and the stage is not covered and the wood thereof would be slippery, it was first decided that we would skip the performance dancing this year, and do only the traditional children's dancing around the pole. So we dancers joined the musicians on the stage to sing the songs to which the children would dance, and the kids from our group were joined by all of the children present for the dancing.

Luckily, the rain stopped during that part of the program, so as the kid's dances finished some of our dancers got out some large squeegee things and dried off the wooden stage, and we did our performance as planned. I danced with our dance teacher, since archinonlive had committed to run sound at the other park this year, and was already there, and her husband is one of the musicians, and so didn't dance. Just before we danced some of the local SCA folk I know got up on stage, in costume, and announced the upcoming Medieval Week that will be held on that site in a few weeks. I would have loved to have joined them, but my costume for the day was centuries too late.

As soon as we finished dancing at the first park we all piled into cars and drove to a park in the city center, where we repeated the performance (including erecting another leaf, flower, and ribbon covered pole for the children to dance around) again there. (We had helped make that one on Thursday, before doing a practice session of the dances--I don't know who made the one for Gammelstad.) After that performance we helped pack down the sound equipment, musician tent, and booths, drove them back to storage in Gammelstad, and were home again by 17:30.

We then spent a bit of time relaxing with popcorn (me) and a beer (him--not that he is in the habit of drinking them--the few beers we purchased at the store that day were the first I have seen in the apartment in the nearly six months of living here) curled up on the couch together watching a video. As you may recall I am not a big watcher of movies, and I pretty much quit watching TV back in the 1980's when I joined the SCA and discovered that I would rather do things than sit around staring at a box watching people do things. I have not owned a TV since, and rarely lived in a house wherein there was a TV. archinonlive doesn't own an old fashioned TV, but he does have a projection system hooked up to his computer and stereo system, so he can watch movies when he wishes to.

Sometime recently he talked me into watching Stargate with him--I had never really heard of it hitherto, so we saw first the movie, and are now slowly working our way through the series--this weekend we saw episode 5. In general I would still far prefer to read a story than watch one, but curling up in his lap to share a story isn't a bad thing, so we will likely work our way through his video library over time, though at the rate I am willing to watch it will take years.

After watching the show we then proceeded with the fun part of the evening--starting the stitching on my winter coat. I had originally started this coat while I was in Tassie, made out of a nice sturdy black wool that we got free from a friend who knows someone in the business of providing theaters with fire retardant curtains--he regards any length that is too short to fall from ceiling to floor in a theater as "scrap", and so many SCA folk who know him have garb made of this stuff. When I cut out the coat then I didn't have a suitable lining, so I cut up an old raw silk dress with which I lined the skirt, and used some nice sturdy black silk I had to line the sleeves and upper body (which makes it easy to put the coat on over a wool sweater when it is really cold out).

Sadly, the old dress had been washed in detergent too many times, and it quickly wore out under the hard use that a winter coat gets, and so the lining was starting to hang in ribbons. I had also not been all that happy with the cut of the coat--the execution and the initial vision didn't mesh as well as I would have liked. So I took it apart and cut new lining for it out of a blue and white wool I picked up in Italy (keeping the nice silk for the upper part of the body, but over the second wool, so the top will be three layers thick), and changed the cut of the pieces so that the waist of the coat better aligns with my own waist--I wound up changing the cut of some of the pieces quite dramatically, and added two new panels that are simple rectangles at the front center to make up for narrowing all of the other pieces. It has been sitting in that state for days now, waiting for us to finish his Folk Dance shirt for this weekend so that we could then start on the coat.

Last night and today we have been making progress on the coat in small bits. Today, after visiting with his brother and sister-in-law in the morning the progress has been going like this: He stitches a seam while I read to him out of the Swedish version of Harry Potter (I have been listening to it in audio book, and am a chapter ahead of what I am reading to him, so that helps, but he still has to correct my pronunciation of a number of oddly spelled words. Who ever heard of silent L's anyway?). Then he takes a break with his computer game in progress while I trim the excess of the parts of the seam that need to be folded inside the flat felled seam. Then he does the second pass with the sewing machine, stitching the seam shut, and returns to his game while I pin the next piece onto the coat. We are more than half way done assembling it now, but it is getting lateish, so I don't know how far we will get tonight. But I am hopeful that we will have it done before I fly to Winter on Thursday.

That will be something of a shock to the system--the temp isn't THAT different--it is 16 C here (at nearly 23:00), and it is 9C in Hobart just now (where it is almost 07:00 tomorrow morning), but the change in number of hours of daylight is going to be really noteworthy. At least there won't be any mosquitoes down there this time of the year--they are quite plentiful here, and one must dress to keep covered unless one wishes lots of bites.

My plan for Australia is: Land in Sydney on the evening of Friday the 1st (ash clouds permitting), train to Canberra the morning of the 2nd, turn in my visa application at the Embassy the morning of Monday, 4 July, then head on to the Melbourne area a day or three later (depending on if the Embassy wants to see me again straight away--they have already seen pdf files of my application packet, but it must be filed officially in person, with proper payment of fees) to visit my step sister and her family, and my mother who is also visiting them. I will fly to Tassie the morning of 10 July (again, ash clouds permitting--mom has had her flight there from Melbourne delayed once already), where I will await word on my visa, staying with mushroom_maiden, whose normal housemate will be in Iceland.

How long will I need to wait? That simply cannot be predicted. Duke Elfin told me at Double Wars that when he submitted this sort of visa application to the Embassy in Canberra back in 1996 it was approved only one week after he applied! However, their web page warns that the process can take up to 7 or 8 months. The cover letter accompanying my application lists my top three dates by which I would wish to return to Sweden and why (before 13 July, so I can teach classes at the local Medieval week and then spend all of archinonlive's vacation with him, or before early August so that we can use the ferry tickets we purchased to attend the Medieval week in Gotland, or before September, so that we can teach the beginning Swedish Folk Dance class we agreed to teach). I hope that they like my application well enough to reach the decision and approve my visa on time for one or all of them.